[vacri]

You are not expected to parse 'docker ps' output programatically.

On the other hand, it's also not very friendly for terminals, either. Huge amounts of pointless whitespace means 'docker ps' is a confusing mess on a standard 80-char terminal.

The cli a non-uniform experience. Whether you're starting or stopping a docker container, you get the same output - the name of the container you supplied. No 'starting', no 'stopping', no 'ok', just the literal string you gave it. So 'docker ps' is meant for human eyes only, but 'docker start/stop' doesn't consider it worthwhile to provide a human-friendly string?

Just recently I've been playing with docker.py, and the inconsistencies continue there. On the cli, the port and volume bindings are assigned when you 'docker create' a container, then you just start/stop it. In docker.py, the port and volume locations are exposed in 'create', but not actually bound there - they're bound in 'start'... which applies the settings to the container's config permanently, so that other methods of starting (cli) also pick them up. It's all very weird.